C1 to C9

Dark.

My name is Hardar Muran, and this journal is my last effect on the universe.

After a line like that, you would expect some sort of apology for melodrama and clarification, but there isn’t any. After several months of destroying sleeper drones, they’ve hit back. Everyone but me had their ship and pods destroyed when a routine clear of a small group of drones went horribly wrong. I have considered suicide as an easy escape, but my capsule seems to have malfunctioned from that last fight, no, slaughter. I’m lucky the interfaces still work and I’m not going to put my faith in a bunch of machines broadcasting me across a hundred universes back to Jita.

I can’t leave my pod without forfeting any interfacing with the ships out here, so I’m trapped in this prison. Heh.

Immortality, right?

I suppose, on reflection, that it was only a matter of time before this happened. We’ve been killing these drones and using the parts to built horrible caricatures of them for our purposes, I can see how fate would deal us a blow sooner or later. I can’t fly any of these damn gallente covert-ops class ships, but maybe I can get the probe launcher off one of them and make something work.

Day three
Taking apart a complicated ship without anything recognisable as hands has proven impossible, so I’ve launched one of the gallente scan ships into space and blown it to bits. Three probes survived the explosion, but one is damaged. I’ve brought it into the station’s ship maintenance array to try and repair it with the cargo drones, but it will take a while. I’ve heard nothing from the sleeper drones and I’ve got enough fuel for the station to last a few months, with plenty of oxygen and food.

Day twenty
I know more now about scan probes than the Sisters or my capsuleer skill manager ever thought possible. I can make these things, I know it! I just need materials. I can scavenge the circuitry, but how the hells am I going to get enough minerals?

Day fourty.
The planets in this godforsaken system have the materials I need, so I’ve been remotely mining them with a few extensively modified drones. I’ve also modified this mining array to accept these spare battleship-sized guns we had, as I don’t have a ship big enough to use them anymore. The planets are as empty as the station, no-one there.

No-one anywhere.

They say that space is silent, but that doesn’t mean anything but an absence of sound. What they SHOULD say is that space is dead. There’s nothing here but me.

Day fifty.
I remember back when my dad would show me how he made hobgoblins back on Gisleres II, and me never caring why or what any part went where.

I miss him.

Day sixty-seven.
I’ve cobbled together a probe and repaired the broken one, which brings me to a total of four. I can fit these to my ship and fly away and find a way home! Go, leave, fly, float, free!

Day sixty-eight.

One day, seventeen hours.

One day, sixteen hours, fifty-nine minutes and fifty five seconds.

The sleepers were there. They were always there. Every time I took a little from their planets and scurried, scurried, scurried back to my little hovel, they learned a little more about where I was.

And now they know. They found me. Hide and seek, one two three…… there’s no-one here but you and me.

But now, I can look too! Not for them but for away. I want to find away and fly away forever from them. To my family.

I miss them.

one day, sixteen hours, fifty-seven minutes and fourty-four seconds.

Day seventy.
The tower is gone. But I’m gone from the tower. They shot it all, burned it to bits while I watched, safe and sound in my invisible boat in the sky. The oxygen canisters burned with a brilliant flame, bright, happy colors against the endless black. Endless, endless black.

They’re gone. The tower is gone. Everything is gone but me. I have fuel and paste and air for a week or two at most, and then my beautiful buzzard and I shall sail endlessly in this blackness.

No-one speaks.

Out go the probes. Will they speak to me?

Day seventy-three.
The probes have gone and sailed and flown and found. It’s all useless junk, sleepers or sleeper stations or wormholes watched by the sleepers. My father is in my head, reminding me that a program, no matter how evil, still isn’t.

It’s just doing what someone told it to do, but he never saw the dedication these creations have to see me dead.

But we’ll dissapoint them, won’t we? My yellow darlings scour the space and look, look, look for all of time.

Day seventy-five
This wormhole is guarded, like all the rest. I’ve watched it in my flying piece of metal, watched the watchers watch the wormhole while they watch for me. Everyone looks but only I find.

I don’t know how the sleepers are finding the wormholes, but I do know one thing. I’m faster than them. I almost risked escape this time, but they appeard as I had a moment of uncertanty. That moment is gone, and now it’s only me and the metal. The damaged probe has malfunctioned, and isn’t answering it’s recall function. I can’t fix it, so I have one hour to find a wormhole and fly through it, find people and talk to them and live.

live.

live.

I want to live.

——————–
I’ve found it! I am already hurtling towards it, that path in the space, road in the sky, and soon I fly through and find my salvation!

I’m coming, child! I’m coming, wife!

John stared at his cargo register. There, next to meticulously organized bits of sleeper and ancient data was a newer piece of equipment, a computer drive with a few documents on it. It was useless compared to the sleeper databanks they’d found along with it, and he quickly forgot it in favor of coordinating the next sleeper site. He wasn’t worried, though. It was just another round of turkey shooting one small group at a time. Stupid drones.